Monday, 29 February 2016

Leap of Faith

Please welcome author Sue Barnard to my blog...

Today (29th February) is a very special
date.It occurs only once every four
years – and, in some cases, not even then.It is Leap Year Day.

The origin of the Leap Year as we know it dates back more
than two thousand years, to the time of Julius Caesar.The Earth’s orbit round the Sun takes 365¼
days, and it was Caesar who first decreed that to make up for the odd
quarter-day which is lost every year, an extra calendar day should be added
every four years.The extra day (Leap
Year Day) is added at the end of February, which is the shortest month.A year is a Leap Year if its last two digits
can be exactly divided by four.

Special though this day is, it has one obvious
disadvantage.People who happen to be
born on this extra day (Leap Year Babies) can only, strictly speaking,
celebrate their birthday once every four years.This anomaly is used to great effect in the Gilbert &
Sullivan comic opera The Pirates of
Penzance.The hero, Frederick,
is contracted to serve as a pirate until his 21st birthday – but he
was born on 29th February, and so will not in fact reach this
birthday until he is well into his eighties.

Sometimes, to add insult to injury, Fate deals Leap Year
Babies a particularly bad hand.Adding
a whole extra day every four years slightly over-compensates for the
irregularity, so in order to keep the calendar in check, century years are leap
years only if the whole year is an exact multiple of 400.Thus, 2000 was a leap year, and 2400 will
be, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not – so Leap Year Babies who were alive at
those turns of the century (such as the composer Gioachino Rossini,
who was born on 29th February 1792) would have to go without a
birthday for eight years rather than four.

The crime writer Ruth Rendell made good
use of this little-known peculiarity in her short story When The Wedding Was Over.The key to the mystery centres on the fact that 1900 was not a leap
year.

But Leap Year Day also brings one notable advantage,
particularly for the girls.According
to tradition, marriage proposals can only be made by the male partner in the
relationship.But once every four
years, on Leap Year Day, women are able to take a giant leap of faith and
propose to men.

And they are in excellent literary company.In what is probably the world’s most famous
love story, the first mention of marriage is made not by the hero but by the
heroine – none other than Shakespeare’s Juliet.

Three words, dear Romeo, and goodnight indeed.

If that thy bent of love be honourable,

Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,

By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll layAnd follow thee, my lord, throughout the world.Romeo & Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2 (the Balcony Scene), lines
142-148

That marriage takes place in secret the very next day, with
the connivance of Friar Lawrence and Juliet’s nurse.But almost immediately after the ceremony the story begins its
dreadful downward spiral into tragedy.One catastrophic event follows another, culminating three days later in
the young lovers’ maddeningly preventable double suicide.

I’ve always loved the story of Romeo & Juliet but have
always hated the way it ended, and I’ve often wondered what might have happened
if even just one of the events leading up to the tragedy had happened
differently.This was what prompted me
to take a huge leap of faith of my own, and write my first novel, The Ghostly Father.

The book is a re-telling of the original Romeo & Juliet
story, told from the point of view of the Friar (the eponymous Ghostly Father),
but with a few new twists and a whole new outcome.I originally wrote the book just for myself, because I wanted to
give the characters a better chance at happiness – but judging by the number of
people who have bought it, read it, and been kind enough to say they enjoyed
it, it appears that I’m not by any means the only person who prefers the
alternative ending.

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